Chicago, Baltimore,
Cleveland, Minneapolis…

Democrats Are
the Bosses
of the Racist Killer Cops

Demonstrators in New York City on December 28, the night it
was announced that the Cleveland cop who murdered 12-year-old
Tamir Rice would not be indicted for anything. (Ellen Moynihan / Gothamist)

Build a Revolutionary
Workers Party!

JANUARY 9 – If 2014 was the Year of Mass
Protest Against Racist Cop Terror, 2015 was the Year of More
Racist Cop Terror. After drawing up the annual balance sheet
of official murder in the United States, the bottom line is
1,202 killed by the police, according to the tally of
killedbypolice.net. In 2014 the body count was 1,108. And
2016? Still more racist cop terror, count on it.

Well over a thousand people a year, torn from family and
friends, their lives cruelly snuffed out, their futures stolen
by a lawless armed force that kills with impunity: the police.
And those deaths are only the ones reported in the media. They
don’t even include the name of Sandra Bland, found hanged in a
Texas jail cell last July, because a county coroner ruled it a
suicide. We say Sandra Bland was lynched, as so many
others have been as well, by asystem of racist police
terror. The name of that system is American capitalism,
founded on chattel slavery and resting today on wage slavery.
Racial oppression is in its DNA.

2015 also underscored how the entire capitalist “justice
system,” from top to bottom, works seamlessly to protect the
killers. As the year drew to a close there was a drumbeat of
legal decisions in which cops were not charged or not found
guilty in the deaths of their unarmed black victims. On December
16, a mistrial was declared in the case of one of the
Baltimore police officers in the van where Freddie Gray was
killed last May. On December 21, a grand jury
hand-picked by a local judge and the district attorney in
Waller County, Texas failed to indict anyone for Sandra
Bland’s death. And on December 28 a grand jury in
Cleveland, led by the nose by a DA who drip-fed the media with
leaks favorable to the cop, brought no charges against the
trigger-happy officer who gunned down 12-year-old Tamir Rice
in November 2014.

Although the outcomes produced consternation and outrage,
they were no surprise, since the ruling class depends on its
badge-toting hired guns as capitalism’s first line of defense.
And the police murder machine grinds on, at a rate of over
three victims a day. So despite constant protests since the
release of the dashcam video of Chicago police killing Laquan
McDonald over a year ago, on December 26 Chicago cops shot
Quintonio LeGrier, 19, and Bettie Jones, 54, a grandmother, as
she opened the front door to let the police in.

In the face of mass protests of tens of thousands who marched
night after night in 2014 over the police murders of Eric
Garner in New York and Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the
cops were never charged. And while there has been an uptick in
prosecutions since then, with 24 last year compared to less
than five a year over the previous decade (New York Times,
30 December 2015), killer cops are almost never convicted.
While thousands of civilians were killed by police from 2005
to 2014, only eleven cops were convicted of anything,
according to the Washington Post (11 April 2015).

The slaughter has become so notorious that there are now
multiple lists of victims, updated daily. In addition to killedbypolice.net), the
second and most detailed accounting is The
Counted, a project of the London Guardian, which
showed 1,138 killed by police in 2015. A third compilation, at
mappingpoliceviolence.org,
gave a total of 1,152, while a fourth, by the Washington
Post (with the apparent intent of whitewashing the
cops), showed a death toll of “only” 986. African Americans
make up one-third of those killed by the police, and together
with Latinos, Asians or Native Americana victims, fully half
the victims are racial/ethnic minorities. Compare that to
Britain, where 3 people were killed by police in 2015, 1 in
2014, 0 in 2013; or Germany, where 2 were killed in 2015, 1 in
2014, 2 in 2013. Like the death penalty, the massive
racist killing by U.S. police goes back to the very
foundation of American capitalism on the basis of slave
labor. That bloody heritage continues to this day.

According to the Washington Post (26 December), “the
kind of incidents that have ignited protests in many U.S.
communities — most often, white police officers killing
unarmed black men — represent less than 4 percent of fatal
police shootings.” Instead, “the great majority of people who
died at the hands of the police fit at least one of three
categories: they were wielding weapons, they were suicidal or
mentally troubled, or they ran when officers told them to
halt.” But contrary to the Fraternal Order of the Police
(FOP), running from the cops, as Mike Brown did in Ferguson,
is not a crime: he might have (rightly) feared for his life.
Nor is mental illness. As for “wielding a weapon,” by the Post’s
criteria the pocket knife in the hand of Laquan McDonald and
toy guns like that held by Tamir Rice count as “weapons.”

The fact is that the police consider a badge a license to
kill with impunity, and the statistics bear them out. Since
the killing goes on and on – and despite all the cellphone
videos, surveillance cameras videos, dashcam and now bodycam
recordings, the killers are almost never punished – liberals
now talk of better police “training.” But the police are doing
exactly what they are trained to do: shoot to kill. Virulent
racism is well-nigh universal in police forces – a reflection
of the fact that black and brown men in particular are
targeted as “suspects.” Even where this is proven in great
detail, for example in the Department of Justice investigation
of Ferguson, nothing changes. What is hardly ever mentioned,
however, is that the police have bosses, namely mayors and
city councils, which in cities across the U.S. are Democrats.
The federal government, which supplies local cops with huge
arsenals of heavy weapons, and controls the FBI, ICE and other
police agencies, is also run by Democrats.

From mayors Rahm Emanuel in Chicago, Frank Jackson in
Cleveland, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake in Baltimore and Bill de
Blasio in New York City to Barack Obama in the White House and
his attorney general Loretta Lynch, the political leaders who
preside over the murderous police forces, and thus are
responsible for the racist killing spree, are almost all
Democrats. Obama, meanwhile, is running an international
Murder, Inc., personally signing off on drone strikes that
have killed thousands of civilians in Muslim countries. It is
the Democratic Party of racist repression and imperialist war
that is running the country on behalf of Wall Street. But
since the Democrats’ partners in crime, the Republicans, like
to play hard cop, especially in this election year, much of
the anti-racist protest is directed at them. Racist state
terror has been a cornerstone of U.S. capitalism throughout,
and it is this system that must be shut down, by workers and
the oppressed mobilizing our class power, leading to socialist
revolution.

As the Internationalist Group has insisted from the start, only
revolution can bring justice! ■